June 29, 2007
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Final Harry Potter expected to set book franchise record!
The Boston Globe reported that the final installment of the Harry Potter series is on track to break previous sales records as its British publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, said yesterday that export orders are already 17 percent ahead of the total overseas sales of the last book.
The seventh book in the franchise about the boy magician, “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” will be published on July 21 with much fanfare, including a midnight reading and signing in London by author J.K. Rowling.
Pre-orders on Amazon are outstripping all the top 20 best-selling books put together. The online retailer has taken more than 1.4 million worldwide orders for the Edinburgh writer’s final story about the schoolboy wizard, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.
The Herald of Scotland, reported that the rush to buy the incredibly popular tales set a record for books sold in 24 hours, with a massive 2,009,574 copies sold through British bookshops, supermarkets, internet sites and newspapers. Sales in the US were even faster with 6.9 million copies sold on the release day.
The Potter books have been translated into 65 languages and have so far sold more than 300 million copies around the world since the first book was published in 1997.
That has made Rowling a multimillionaire — with a net worth of around $1.09 billion, according to The Sunday Times annual rich list, in contrast to the $639 million net worth of Queen Elizabeth II — and underpinning Bloomsbury’s profit for several years.
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